Tag: lamestream media

I saw this video (see below) on CNN regarding Sarah Palin’s mistake on rising grocery prices. Anderson Cooper says in the video that this is a minor issue, but I’m going out on a limb here and say that this is a huge issue. Often times, when Palin gets a fact wrong, she blames the “lamestream media”. Her followers believe that mainstream media is consistently wrong and unfairly picks on her. She encourages this belief.

To me, that makes her attacks on a reporter (Sudeep Reddy) who points out Palin’s mistake threatening to the ability of the American people to separate fact from fiction. We’re becoming a nation of lemmings. We pass on emails filled with errors and outright lies without checking their facts and figures. We pass on “information” without researching it ourselves.

By not doing our own fact-checking, we are fast becoming a nation of non-thinkers. Worst, I read about a series of studies conducted by the University of Michigan that “when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.”

That scares the Hell out of me — does it do the same to you? People who can be told a fact do not change their beliefs to match that fact.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin…

She stated the following: “everyone whoever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so.”

Sudeep Reddy pointed out that “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record (since the Labor Department started keeping this measure in 1968).” Instead of admiting her mistake, as Anderson Cooper points out in the below video, she went on the attack.

This means, to me at least, that Sarah Palin is one of those “misinformed people” who, when confronted by the facts, cannot change their beliefs to meet them.

This woman wants to be President of the United States. She ran for Vice President, for pete’s sake. And, yet, when confronted with a fact that goes against her beliefs, she attacks the messenger. She cannot wrap her head around the idea that she might be wrong.

Isn’t the sign of a good leader someone who can admit that they were incorrect and adjust accordingly?

Isn’t that the sign of a good employee? And, doesn’t the President of the United States work for us?

Have you ever worked with someone that attacks back when a mistake of theirs is pointed out? I have. I wouldn’t want that person being President of Dog catching, much less President of the United States.

In the next two years, I believe Palin has a long way to go to prove to the American public that she could, indeed, run this country.